Future of Storage

This last year has seen dramatic changes in the storage industry, but it also showed the resilience of this industry. This is a huge $40B+ industry that accelerated by 14% in Q3 2017, according to IDC. Storage capacity shipped increased to 72.5 exabytes for that quarter alone. So where is the industry going? What will be the strong trends? What will be the effect of GDPR and other new regulations? How is the cloud changing storage? What other technology trends may drive the industry? Here are our predictions for 2018.

Disk or Tape? Guess Which Technology Has a Future. Rumors of tape’s demise have been circulating for almost 3 decades, and yet the medium is still with us. But perhaps not for much longer: Now that the cloud is muscling into the backup and archiving role, it looks like tape-based storage may be nearing its final days. As far back as 2010, The Register reported a 25% decline in tape drive and media sales. Fast- forwarding (to use some tape-derived slang) to February 2017, the same publication speculated aloud about the latest nail in tape’s coffin, in an article titled.